A Feminist Act of Adaptation:

Identities and Discourses in Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen

Abstract

This article examines Michèle Roberts’s 1990 novel, In the Red Kitchen, as a neo-Victorian text that deconstructs the Victorian discourses which continue to construct and exert control over female identities in modern society. Roberts engages heavily with the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva in order to write this deconstruction, and, in linking this psychoanalytic discourse with tropes of haunting and spiritualism, creates a neo-Victorian space in which the narrative voices converge. Thus the traumas to which the female characters are subjected at the hands of patriarchal discourses are exposed. Roberts undermines these discourses in order to suggest that only a feminist understanding of the past and reappraisal of the future can heal these traumas.